Participants in our eight-day fast started each day with a time of reflection. This year, asked to briefly describe who or what we had left behind and yet might still carry in our thoughts that morning, I said that I'd left behind an imagined WWI soldier, Leonce Boudreau.

Marching down the streets of NYC in remembrance of MLK, I thought not of the anger swarming around me, but of the King that Dr. King followed. There is no freedom apart from Jesus, no victory that does not include His name.

Creative altruism comes in many different forms. But it stems from a mindset of helping others whenever you can even when there is no direct benefit to you. So here are three ways to practice creative altruism.

I admire people like Martin Luther King who spoke out for those who were afraid or unable to do so. His message today is as strong as ever, although I worry that much of the world does not seem to want to listen.

To those of every race who have fought for, and continue to fight for, the equal rights of African Americans in this country, your stories, sacrifices, and contributions will not be forgotten. I will not allow it. Black lives matter. Black history matters. And we will not forget.

This month, as we celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., let us remember that optimism -- hope built on values and leavened by humility, hope based on conviction even when we cannot be sure of the outcome -- is an essential ingredient in the kind of leadership we admire in him.

We began this week by celebrating the 85th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth, but today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in an important case that could knock down a crucial racial and economic pillar of justice built during the civil rights movement.

For every theater-goer, minimum wage-earner or maximum wage-maker who applauded, cried, or expressed righteous indignation at the story told in Selma, we'd like to remind them that the story of economic justice is still being written in our country, city and state.

When I was born, it would've been inconceivable to imagine that we would be celebrating the birthday of a non-violent black civil rights leader as a national holiday. Or that we would have a biracial president. Yet we still live in a country riddled with prejudice and hatred of the 'other.'

The radical actors of the Muslim world, in destroying the troublesome symbols of free thinking, are destroying their own cultural vitality and dynamism. In truth, their Islamist culture of death has resulted in a death of Islamic culture. The urgent task for Islamic pluralists is to lift the shadow of violence from the Islamic culture and recall Muslims to their traditions of an empathetic civilization that feels another's sorrow and does not need an enemy for its sustenance.